Balancing Is in the Eye of the Beholder: Explaining the Critical Case of Late Imperial China

Abstract

Abstract Balancing is at the core of the realist approach to the behaviour of states in international relations. Excluding cases of state incoherence, states are expected to balance promptly and infallibly whenever the balance of power shifts to their disadvantage. In this article, I explain a critical puzzle: why did China not respond to the external shock of Western military intervention between the 1840s and 1900 with a more robust balancing response? I argue that, in order to start balancing, China needed to abandon its Confucian ideational structures and replace them with ones resembling contemporary realism. I demonstrate that such structures were adopted after the acquisition of Chinese versions of social Darwinism. My argument, therefore, is that balancing occurs only as long as the structure of the international system is in sync with the affected actors’ ideational structures.